@jennwrites thanks
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Has anyone considered the free tier of Azure App Service? Can create and deploy to it all from vscode. I use that for all my projects now.
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My main site is hosted on Neocities, so I’ll be moving my Glitch projects there. Static hosting only, but it has an online editor (no live preview) and files can be dragged and dropped into the browser. I led an intro HTML/CSS workshop last summer, and that’s where I had everyone set up their sites. I recommend it, especially to those looking for free beginner-friendly options for students.
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Before I found glitch i enjoyed the fact that in AWS(!!), I could write serverless Node functions (“lambdas”) in the browser and very easily store assets. But everything else was very hard. Very very hard.
(Since then I used Firebase for similar purposes, but I am responding in a separate post about my Firebase experience.)
Thank you for suggestions. I use it for education for students to create and learn. I am exploring various options.
At one point I used AWS for commercial work and Glitch for fun and experimentation.
But AWS makes everything [except bucket-based storage] a giant royal pain in the butt, with a million layers of abstraction and documentation that is written for those who already know what it is explaining.
So I found myself publishing some serious stuff on Glitch. It works now, I figured, and I’ll worry later about scaling. [Later is here, brothers and sisters!]
But I have one large-scale project that needed a complete re-architecture. Way too big for Glitch, so I tried moving ii from AWS to Google’s platform (Firebase).
I like. Google Cloud Storage is as easy to use as AWS and features like IAM are a million times simpler, especially if you want to collaborate.
Simple static hosting on Firebase, is super easy and pretty much free. Unlike Glitch, I can stay in VSCode and instantly deploy to Firebase hosting and push to GitHub repo, while managing my assets very directly. Frankly it is so easy that, without thinking about it, I stopped using Glitch for quicky hosting. Firebase is free, easier and more secure (repo-wise) and so much better performance. (Glitch, I still love you.)
Also you get user authentication for free (I use it) and tons of tracking features that I do not use as well as a million infrastructure features I don’t even understand.
It gets hairy when you want to move your Glitch Node apps.
I have ported small Glitch Node Express servers to serverless Cloud Run functions (These run Express under the hood, it turns out) – and this is relatively easy. With enough work. In fact I usually edit these in the cloud, like with Glitch (Cloud Run functions do not play nice with VSCode and Github😒) .
Serverless functions may be impractical if you have a complex server. I’m about to find out.
But the huge problem with Firebase is no SQL support. I ported my big app from SQL to their NoSQL database but it was a huge job with a lot of rethinking. But the result is worthwhile. The new database is better in most ways.
I have an active public app on Glitch now that uses the wonderful SQLLite. It is a complex app with many daily users who submit and discuss some important UGC. Database is the core of the app and I really do not want to rebuild it. I don’t think I can in this six week window.
Any ideas where to go with a system based on SQLLite3??
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Super sad that Glitch is shutting down. I’ve been here since the Hyperdev days. Also, at risk of making @jenn say something out of pocket, Glitch really should charge for hosting! Make it utterly exorbitant – it’s better than having no option at all. You could even make it so expensive that you expect everyone to choose to migrate. At least it would let people pay for more time to migrate.
But if that’s a lost cause…
I see that Replit has an old “import from Glitch” feature from some years ago when they first caught up to Glitch in terms of project hosting:
Unfortunately, it’s not working for me. Is it working for others? If not, I wonder if Replit could be persuaded to fix it, since it might net them a lot of us Glitch emigres.
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LOL I just used it two minutes ago, it doesn’t seem like it does anything but when you go to Apps, the imported project does show up, assuming your tier isn’t maxed out.
If people are looking for a paid alternative, Replit is perfect, but only if you are wanting to pay. You can only have 3 free “repls” on a free account.
i haven’t started migrating my stuff yet, but https://napkin.io might be a good fit for node-based projects. It’s got the nice feature of being able to have projects with their source code public, as on glitch, so if I want things to be public but not deployed through some silly github actions workflow, I can just chuck them on there. Definitely better for smaller things though - it’s serverless functions rather than a server.
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val.town too, but i would recommend cloudflare workers+pages
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Have we learned nothing from Glitch’s demise? So much better to be a paying customer!
Here’s my brainstorming list of options to check out:
- Replit
- GitHub Codespaces + Live Share + Pages
- CodeSandBox
- StackBlitz (Codeflow / Bolt.new)
- Val Town
- Codesphere
- CodePen Projects (Pro)
- Gitpod
- Render
- Netlify
- DigitalOcean
- Vercel
- Napkin
- Cloudflare workers+pages
Any that I’m missing or any that you think I should rule out, I’d be grateful to hear.
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I was a paying glitch customer, that’s no guarantee
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great list. it would be good if anyone uses those platforms to be able to put a price to them
eg how much to host one always-on nodejs app
as a comparison Glitch Pro let you host 5 always-on sites for $10
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well with onrender you can use uptimerobot to host one 24/7 per account (since you have 750 free hours / 24 = approx 31.25 days)
i personally think its the go-to hosting software
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Firebase was mentioned and Supabase is an open-source alternative.
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Some people have mentioned Cloud Run which competes with other serverless products, and is pretty much free.
But it requires building containers and redeploying, meaning every change takes 2-3mins just to see, and any frontend code included in the app must be built into the container as well, so e.g. changing HTML or an image is a full redeploy. Unless you build it as a REST backend and your frontend static stuff on somewhere like Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages and do XHR requests (CORS, etc).
The killer features for me in Glitch were:
- nice built-in editor with changes reflected immediately
- frontend and backend on the same platform/project
- commandline access to do bulk/tedious tasks
- all within the browser
Can’t seem to determine if alternatives have such things. On the positive side I guess I will have to learn how to do CI/CD or interactive development that triggers deployments from a repo, which makes it easier to use basically any platform.
Some notes I may edit later:
Cloudflare workers
Online Code Editor provides a browser-based editor that’s powered by VS Code for Web with real-time preview.
For more complex projects, local development, or CI/CD pipelines, Cloudflare recommends using their command-line tool, Wrangler.
Firebase
Now offers Firebase Studio, a full IDE with live preview.
Thank you so much for Neocities recommendation, it does look very promising!
Basing my search off of it, I also found Nekoweb. Looks to be similar in idea with seemingly less limits. I have yet to check them out, I am juggling multiple projects right now and struggling to get by (hence I got so desperate to actually hit the forums with my problem).
Will do my best to keep you updated here, but this may take a long while.
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you can also use github sync! personally that’s the best option
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so I have nearly 60 apps that I need to migrate. and about a hundred more that I can let die.
30 static apps can all go onto Netlify without much fuss, just need to download the assets.
the 30 nodejs apps are a nightmare though! at least 10 of them are bots and would need to be always-on, the rest are just websites
thinking of getting a digitalocean server and putting them all on there, with a cloudpanel or similar UI to get the sites set up
anyone else got any plans for migrating a large number of apps?
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